Information technology assets are commonly valuable and important assets which merit protection. Accordingly, information technology assets are often backed up to allow a system to be restored to a previous state, to avoid losing valuable information technology in the case of a system failure. It is often preferable for information technology assets to be restored as quickly as possible following a system failure. A challenge for management systems designed to protect information technology assets is that because many computing systems frequently change, and require frequent back ups, the methods for storing historical configuration data take up too much disk space or take to long to restore the system.
Management systems often back up information technology assets by regularly storing a complete version of a computing system, resulting in hundreds or thousands of complete versions stored, with most versions having only minor changes. However, this method often consumes an inordinately large amount of disk space. For example, a computing system may store five hundred complete versions of data so that the data may be quickly restored to any point in time for the last five hundred updates. Other management systems back up information technology assets by first storing one complete version of a computing system then regularly storing the changes made to the computing system. This method may cause the restore time to be rather long because many updates may have been performed since the initial version of the information technology assets were stored and each update must be applied to the initial version. Long restore times are often caused because the version desired is typically the most recent version or a relatively recent version. For example, the original complete version of a computing system may need to be updated with five hundred updates to get to the desired system state. The prior art methods of backing up and restoring computing systems are often becoming less efficient with computing systems often requiring more disk space and more frequent updates than systems of the past. The prior art fails to offer a management system that can back up and restore a computing system to a recent version without inefficiently using a large amount of disk space or inefficiently using a large amount of time to restore the system.